Tech That Flopped!

Infinite baffle, as a term.. can ’loosely’ apply to a sealed box where the box resonance is below the woofer’s natural resonance and spring volume equivalent. When saying it, meaning, applying it to this given scenario... try to indicate this is the reason why you are misusing and throwing the term about.

Some confuse open baffle with infinite baffle. Open baffle is open, it has no sealed enclosure for the given low frequency driver.

Infinite baffle, as a term, more correctly applies to an actual infinite baffle, ie a wall mount where the other side is another fully separate room, or fully separated space. but it does not have to truly be sealed, this separate space... just that the two spaces, the front to be listened to and the rear to be separated - have something akin to zero capacity to interact with one another.

eg, most guitar amplifiers are what one would more correctly call open baffle, and most bass amp cabinets are either bass reflex or sealed. This is an area where the problem with home audio has created very very bad bass on the music production side. Big freaking mistake.

Home audio applications of bass reflex have made it to the bass guitar end of things and bass players are buying and using bass reflex cabinets. BIG MISTAKE. When we play this back on our rigs that use bass reflex speakers, we end up with the bass guitars sounding like MUD.

Teo,

Interesting, but maybe we need a new thread? I'm having trouble following your logic at the end.

Best,

E

Teo should be aware of the piles of sealed box guitar speakers (most Marshalls, and many, many others), the actual extremely sophisticated bass amp rigs of varying types (some of which I own and use) utilized by professional musicians far more aware of modern technology than Teo seems to be (Aguilar…look it up), the direct to mixing board/amp mixed bass recording techniques utilized by professional sophisticated bass players, and the generally excellent bass tone of most well recorded brilliant musicians (Larry Grenadier?  Avashai Cohen?) in many of the musical genres people actually carefully listen to…perhaps not in much pop or hip hop where a specific style of overload might be more appropriate, but still…mud could be part of your system, and I suggest you clean it up.

The Ampeg SVT bass amp, for years the gold standard for bass players, is certainly not a sloppy-sounding bass reflex design, but a clean sealed one. Recordings of it with a Fender P-Bass plugged into it sound great on my speakers and subs.

Well, the problem with "time aligned" speakers like Thiele, etc. is that they.... really aren't.  Yes, you can put a microphone at some position and get the direct sound pressure from all drivers to arrive at the same time there.  But only the acoustically naiive believe that only the sound coming directly from a driver to your ear is what matters -- most of the sound energy gets to you by other paths, and its effect is far from irrelevant.  The number of loudspeaker designs that are "time aligned" or "phase coherent" toward other targets than straight ahead is very very small.